Why I Quit Drinking Cow’s Milk and Eating Cheese.

Have you ever wondered why humans drink something designed to be baby calves growth food? Why don’t we drink… I don’t know… giraffe milk instead? Why don’t other animals go to cows and drink their milk? Why is it that our stomachs should be prepared to digest a milk that comes from an animal, when human mothers produce their own milk?

Well, if I’m writing this post you can guess I have asked myself those questions and I have done some research to try to find answers. Was that liquid they make us drink as kids, really providing my bones with the calcium they needed, and thus making them stronger? Or was this some weird thing we picked up a long time ago that really has no health benefits whatsoever? What if it is actually bad for me?

Now this post isn’t a request for you to stop eating dairy, I just thought I would share some of the reasons I personally have decided not to consume it anymore.

Cow’s milk is custom-designed for calves:

Thanks to our creative ingenuity and perhaps related to our ancient survival needs, we adopted the dubious habit of drinking another species’ milk. Nobody can dispute that cow’s milk is an excellent food source for calves. Weighing around 100 pounds at birth, a calf typically gains approximately eight times its weight by the time it is weaned. But unlike humans, once calves are weaned, they never drink milk again. And the same applies to every mammalian species on this planet.

So yeah humans don’t need cow’s milk any more than they need a giraffe’s milk.

Approximately 70 percent of African-Americans, 90 percent of Asian Americans, 53 percent of Mexican Americans, and 74 percent of Native Americans were lactose intolerant.1-4 Studies showed that a substantial reduction in lactase activity is also common among those whose ancestry is African, Asian, Native American, Arab, Jewish, Hispanic, Italian, or Greek.

“Consumption of dairy products, particularly at age 20 years, was associated with an increased risk of hip fracture in old age. (“Case-Control Study of Risk Factors for Hip Fractures in the Elderly”. American Journal of Epidemiology. Vol. 139, No. 5, 1994).

And the 12 year-long Harvard Nurses’ Health Study found that those who consumed the most calcium from dairy foods broke more bones than those who rarely drank milk. This is a broad study based on 77,761 women aged 34 through 59 years of age.

Dairy is linked to many different types of cancer, especially those associated with your hormones:

Harvard’s Physicians’ Health Study followed 20,885 men for 11 years, finding that having two and one-half dairy servings each day boosted prostate cancer risk by 34 percent, compared to having less than one-half serving daily.

Milk does other mischief. Its load of calcium deplete the body’s vitamin D, which, in turn, may add to cancer risk. Most dairy products are also high in fat, which affects the activity of sex hormones that play a major role in cancer.

Cheese is made mostly of casein, where most of the liquid whey found in milk has been filtered or strained out. But all dairy products contain casein, not just cheese. Dr. T. Colin Campbell, author of The China Study, says through his studies he has found casein to be the most relevant cancer promoter ever discovered. Because casein digests so slowly, natural morphine-like substances in casein known as casomorphins, act like opiates in the body as they enter the bloodstream. Just minutes after you eat a dairy-based food, the casein protein begins to break down. This releases the drug-like casomorphins, which attach to opiate receptors in the brain, and cause severe addictions to dairy products (hence the reason they keep people coming back for more.) Casomorphins trigger such an addictive response that they’ve been compared to heroine in terms of their strength to cause food addictions and mood disorders.

Opiate-like casomorphins liberated from the cow’s milk protein, casein, are accused of participating in the cause of such conditions as autism, crib death, type I diabetes, postpartum psychosis, circulatory disorders, and food allergies.

Human breast milk also has casein but only 2.7 g per liter, when cow’s milk has 26 g casein per liter. that is almost ten times more. If human breast milk was custom-made for humans how come we are drinking a substance with nearly 10 times as much casein?

To be totally honest with you I still eat an occasional ice cream or chocolate that contains milk, but for all these reasons I have stopped cooking with dairy products or adding milk to my cereal. I have started using unsweetened almond milk and it is delicious! It really tastes good.

I hope you liked this post and you are considering alternatives to a dairy filled diet. If you can’t get rid of dairy, I do recommend you start lowering the amounts you are consuming. You might notice benefits like less acne and constipation which are always a plus. Good luck with whatever you decide.

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This blog is an invitation to join me in my journey to a more sustainable, healthy and happy lifestyle. I intend to use this platform as a form of self expression, whether it is for fashion, book reviews, health advice, advocacy for causes I feel strongly about or just simple thoughts.